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Wednesday, 13 November 2013

Do
Elephants Weep as an Emotional Response?
Marc Bekoff, LiveScience

September 27, 2013

Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of the world's pioneering cognitive
ethologists, a Guggenheim Fellow, and co-founder with Jane Goodall
of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. This essay is adapted from
one that appeared in Bekoff's column Animal Emotions in Psychology Today. He
contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed &
Insights.

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A recent newspaper article called "Elephant
tears: Newborn weeps after being parted from mother who tried to kill
him" reports about a newborn male elephant who "cried for five hours without
stopping after he was rejected by his mother."

This story immediately
made me think of the book When Elephants Weep (Delta, 1996), which helped to
open the door to people taking the emotional lives of animals more seriously
than they previously had.

I've been studying various aspects of animal
behavior and animal emotions for more than four decades, and
have published numerous books and essays about these areas of inquiry, so the
story about the weeping elephant resulted in my receiving a number of emails and
also in doing an interview with Discovery News.

My approach to, and take
on, this story, is fairly straightforward. I did a Google search for topics
including "Do/can elephants weep?", "Do/can elephants cry?", "Do/can animals
weep?", and "Do/can animals cry?" and found some very interesting answers that
ranged all over the place from "Sure they do" to "Probably they do", to "No,
they don't" I also looked for various positions on whether or not crying/weeping
were associated with various emotions as they are in human animals.

In a
nutshell, available information supports the view that other animals do cry and
weep and that they can be closely associated with various emotions, including,
perhaps most likely, sadness and grief that are associated with loss. Of course,
crying or weeping may be more hard-wired, in the recent case with the infant
elephant responding to a loss of much-needed touch or what is also called
"contact comfort" offered by his mother.

One worker quoted in the above
article noted, "The calf was very upset and he was crying for five hours before
he could be consoled." Humans did try to calm him down but their touch is not
the same as another elephant's, and of course there could also be visual and
olfactory components associated with the potpourri of contact
comfort.

So, while scientists are not 100-percent certain, solid
scientific research supports the view that elephants and other nonhuman
animals weep as part of an emotional response. Rather than dismissing
this possibility as merely storytelling, we need to study it in more
detail. After all, "the plural of anecdote is data" and stories and
citizen science can and should motivate rigorous scientific research. And,
let's not forget that many "surprises" have been discovered in the
emotional lives of animals, including laughing rats and dogs and empathic
chickens, mice and rats — all published in outstanding peer-reviewed
professional journals.

At one website called "Do elephants cry?" I found
the following quote: "However, we do not know what emotions elephants feel, if
any, in the same manner that we do not necessarily know for sure what emotions
other people feel. This is simply because we cannot measure emotions, we can
only experience them. As a result, science cannot say whether elephants
experience emotions, whether other people experience emotions, or what these
emotions are like. This is because science requires that we be able to measure
something in order to draw any conclusions about it."

I couldn't find the
date this answer was posted but it surely does not reflect current or even
recent ideas about the study of human and nonhuman emotions. For example, you
can read excellent examples of recent work in such books as "Gifts of the Crow:
How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans"
(Atria Books, 2013) and "Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow
Creatures" (Crown, 2013)

As with many other aspects of the cognitive and
emotional lives of animals, it turns out that we are not alone, and that human
exceptionalism is more a myth than a fact. So, I offer that we are not the only
animals who cry or weep as an emotional response, though I look forward to more
research on this topic.